What does creativity mean to you?
Tapping into your own life and shared experiences and leveraging that knowledge as a lens through which to view and unpack a challenge. Drawing on different facets of yourself and bringing your intellect, instincts and insights to the table. Using your ears, more than your mouth, to connect dots, connect with people and identify synergies to creatively and collaboratively address challenges.
What attracted you to B!G Mentoring and what are you most looking forward to?
The chance to give back and help unlock creativity and talent in our young people. The opportunity to foster confidence in their own abilities, to back them so that they feel empowered to back themselves. It also resonates really deeply with the work we are doing in UCC in terms of cultivating independent and creative thinking and enabling our students to be creators, evaluators and communicators of knowledge with core values of respect, resilience, ambition, compassion and integrity.
Why is creativity and innovation important in your line of work?
To attract and inspire students to come and learn/research at UCC, I have to constantly think of creative and innovative ways to present our value proposition that will reach, resonate and be relevant to each and every individual.
What do you now know about creativity that you wish you would have known earlier in your career or when you were a student in secondary school?
That the best plans are the ones that have drawn on different skillsets from different team members and taken on board different viewpoints and perspectives. Move out of your comfort zone and seek out opinions and input that are diverse and different to yours, it will help you grow as a person and enable you to think more empathetically, holistically and divergently, three qualities that I think are really fundamental to being creative.
Last but not least! The B!G ‘Whatif!’ If the power of creativity was unleashed in every person, young and old and in between, what do you think Ireland would look like?
More connected (between and across generations), more communitarian, more compassionate, more positive and proactive, more solution-oriented and socially responsible, more caring and more ‘can-do’. Less about the “I” and more about the why, how, when, who and what?
